Word: cricks
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...there, in the fall of 1951, that Watson initially met Crick. (He actually met Crick's wife Odile first. Her only comment afterward: "He had no hair!"--a reference to Watson's crew cut.) Like Wilkins, Crick was a physicist who switched into biology; like Wilkins and Watson, Crick had been impressed with Schrodinger's What Is Life? He wasn't actually studying DNA, though; at age 35, thanks in part to a hiatus for military work in World War II, he was still pursuing his Ph.D. on the X-ray diffraction of hemoglobin, the iron-carrying protein in blood...
...turned out to be utterly compatible. "Jim and I hit it off immediately," writes Crick in his book, What Mad Pursuit, "partly because our interests were astonishingly similar and partly, I suspect, because a certain youthful arrogance, a ruthlessness and an impatience with sloppy thinking came naturally to both of us." (Crick had got in trouble more than once at the Cavendish for pointing out the sloppy thinking of his bosses...
Both men also loved to think out loud, for hours at a stretch, during walks along the river Cam, at meals at the Cricks' flat, at the Eagle and, of course, in the lab, where their incessant chatter drove their colleagues crazy. (Watson and Crick were quickly relegated to a separate office, where they would disturb only each other.) Most important, both were as tenacious as pit bulls. Once they clamped their minds onto the problem of DNA structure, they couldn't let go until they solved it--or someone else got there first...
...defeat was humiliating--"the biggest mistake," Bragg would one day say, "of my scientific career"--and Crick and Watson knew it could easily happen again. Pauling surely understood that the structure of DNA was the next big challenge, and once he turned his powerful brain to the problem, he would certainly crack it. "Within a few days of my arrival," writes Watson, "we knew what to do: imitate Linus Pauling and beat him at his own game." To do so, they would need X rays of DNA, but they would have to look outside Cambridge. The Cavendish's crystallographers were...
Fortunately, Crick was on good terms with Wilkins, the man whose DNA images had originally sparked Watson's interest. Unfortunately, Wilkins was on very bad terms with his King's College colleague, the accomplished but prickly Rosalind Franklin. At 31, she was already one of the world's most talented crystallographers and had recently returned to her home country to take a position at King's after a stint at a prestigious Paris...